The book has always
been a source of fascination to artists. As a vessel enclosing content, as an
object aside from word and meaning, as a toxic medium that can be deconstructed
by visual means, as a surface for painting or drawing, for covering with
ornamental letters and figuration, or as a module within the framework of a
value-added chain. The fundamental contradiction between image and text – the
former an aesthetic configuration that can be grasped simultaneously, the
latter a narrative structure that is decoded sequentially – is at the same time
an agent in the reciprocal fertilization of both artistic dispositifs. Under
the influence of books and book culture, art can evolve a narrative dimension.
Conversely, text can acquire a material substratum through visual forms of
depiction, whose actual presence may tell a very different story than the
letters hidden under or nestled within it.

Book and art: within
this field of tension a dialectic of comprehending and interpreting the world
is at play, and when the demiurgic power of one of these two systems fails, the
other comes to the rescue. In aesthetic interplay and contradiction, in the
activation of diverse cerebral regions in wonderment beyond definable
perception and understanding, the potentials of existential teleologies unfold,
aiming at the absolute, and in missing the mark surveying the frontiers of the
human.